A few noob questions...

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I've been playing WoWS a bit more and I, so far, find it to be a superior game than WoT. Very nice indeed!

Of course, I haven't done much good but I'm hoping I can still improve. :)

I have a few questions in that regard:

1 - I saw someone shooting Blue ammunition once. Is this the IFHE or is there "doubloon ammo" in WoWS? And also, what's so special about IFHE?

2 - Some players are able to consistently deliver shot after shot beyond 15km. I'm quite inaccurate until that distance starts closing. Is there some sort of aiming assistance such as the torpedo "CCIP" (not asking for a built-in aimbot or something remotely close, only if there's a counterpart to it)?

3 - Shouldn't come as a surprise but I feel torpedoes deal too much damage (no arguments against that, though), is there a way I can avoid them or mitigate their damage before it's too late? This is especially needed when sailing BBs.

4 - Are there low tier premium IJN BBs, CAs or DDs? It has to be low tier...

5 - Is there a manual AA or secondary override? Brawling side-by-side another vessel, even 1-on-1 feels they are quite unreliable. Same as AA guns.

6 - How do I check my "depot" (to sell unwanted modules and shells. Come to think of it... Do I get charged after the battle for the ammo I've fired?)?

7 - I've been finding AP shells to be quite disappointing. Most of them overpen. After I checked out the armour profiles, I concluded they're pointless outside the middle since bow and stern are paper thin. Is this a correct statement? And how do I know AP shell pen?

8 - What's a "citadel"?

9 - Why do I get free gifts just for logging in? Is this a "baby shower"?

10 - USN CAs worth it? I somehow got a Charleston(?).

Um... sorry if it's too much (as a writer I have it in me) and I thank you in advance for your answers.

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I've been playing WoWS a bit more and I, so far, find it to be a superior game than WoT. Very nice indeed!

Of course, I haven't done much good but I'm hoping I can still improve. :)

I have a few questions in that regard:

1 - I saw someone shooting Blue ammunition once. Is this the IFHE or is there "doubloon ammo" in WoWS? And also, what's so special about IFHE?

2 - Some players are able to consistently deliver shot after shot beyond 15km. I'm quite inaccurate until that distance starts closing. Is there some sort of aiming assistance such as the torpedo "CCIP" (not asking for a built-in aimbot or something remotely close, only if there's a counterpart to it)?

3 - Shouldn't come as a surprise but I feel torpedoes deal too much damage (no arguments against that, though), is there a way I can avoid them or mitigate their damage before it's too late? This is especially needed when sailing BBs.

4 - Are there low tier premium IJN BBs, CAs or DDs? It has to be low tier...

5 - Is there a manual AA or secondary override? Brawling side-by-side another vessel, even 1-on-1 feels they are quite unreliable. Same as AA guns.

6 - How do I check my "depot" (to sell unwanted modules and shells. Come to think of it... Do I get charged after the battle for the ammo I've fired?)?

7 - I've been finding AP shells to be quite disappointing. Most of them overpen. After I checked out the armour profiles, I concluded they're pointless outside the middle since bow and stern are paper thin. Is this a correct statement? And how do I know AP shell pen?

8 - What's a "citadel"?

9 - Why do I get free gifts just for logging in? Is this a "baby shower"?

10 - USN CAs worth it? I somehow got a Charleston(?).

Um... sorry if it's too much (as a writer I have it in me) and I thank you in advance for your answers.

Action Stations!

special captain and IFHE helps HE to better penetrate armor, no penetration --> no damage

just good aiming, some people have thousandth of games of experience and maybe you are an too easy target

do not get hit in the first place - evasion of torps start long before they are spotted

Mikasa, Tachibana, Katori, otherwise just look at Wiki

no

it is in the harbor, and yes, you get charged for every salvo

generally? No! depends on ship, distance and target

that is a special protected part in some ships, when shells explode there, they do 100% of their damage

it helps you start in the game and motivates people to log in

yes

1

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Blue (and red) shell tracers are the result of using special captains. Blue for Ovechkin captains and red for Halsey/Yamamoto. You can get both halsey and yamamoto by completing their respective campaigns. IFHE on the other hand increases your HE penetration. Some guns are so small that their HE does minimal or no damage. By using IFHE you increase their penetration and therefore your damage. (Most apparent on 100, 152 and 155mm guns, useless on almost all others).

There are no implemented or allowed aim assistants other than the aim-lock (which can also be triggered by pressing X if you need to switch targets). If the player is able to constantly hit you, he's just that good, or is using a ship that has high velocity shells.

If you think or know that there's a DD lurking about, the best thing you can do is not sail in a straight line. Change your course and speed to throw off their aim. Some ships have hydro. It can be used to spot torpedoes from farther away. You can also use your spotter/fighter plane to spot torpedoes (if your ship has it).

Not sure which ones are currently being sold as I'm on my phone, but I do remember a tier 4 premium battleship, also there is the yubari tier 4 IJN cruiser up for grabs in the arsenal.

You can hold ctrl and click on an enemy to focus them. This adds an AA damage bonus aswell as focuses your damage on the priority threat. You can also use the manual AA skill to double the damage output for large caliber AA guns. For secondaries, you can use manual secondary commander skill which will reduce your secondary dispersion by a lot. It's most effective on german and french higher tier BBs.

Click on your name in the top left and then inventory. You cannot sell your shells as they're resupplied automatically. They're also very cheap compared to wot. The only time you can actually notice ammo costs is on tier 9 and 10 battleships, and even then the cost is dwarfed by the repair cost.

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1 - I saw someone shooting Blue ammunition once. Is this the IFHE or is there "doubloon ammo" in WoWS? And also, what's so special about IFHE?

2 - Some players are able to consistently deliver shot after shot beyond 15km. I'm quite inaccurate until that distance starts closing. Is there some sort of aiming assistance such as the torpedo "CCIP" (not asking for a built-in aimbot or something remotely close, only if there's a counterpart to it)?

3 - Shouldn't come as a surprise but I feel torpedoes deal too much damage (no arguments against that, though), is there a way I can avoid them or mitigate their damage before it's too late? This is especially needed when sailing BBs.

4 - Are there low tier premium IJN BBs, CAs or DDs? It has to be low tier...

5 - Is there a manual AA or secondary override? Brawling side-by-side another vessel, even 1-on-1 feels they are quite unreliable. Same as AA guns.

6 - How do I check my "depot" (to sell unwanted modules and shells. Come to think of it... Do I get charged after the battle for the ammo I've fired?)?

7 - I've been finding AP shells to be quite disappointing. Most of them overpen. After I checked out the armour profiles, I concluded they're pointless outside the middle since bow and stern are paper thin. Is this a correct statement? And how do I know AP shell pen?

8 - What's a "citadel"?

9 - Why do I get free gifts just for logging in? Is this a "baby shower"?

10 - USN CAs worth it? I somehow got a Charleston(?).

Um... sorry if it's too much (as a writer I have it in me) and I thank you in advance for your answers.

2: Some ships are more accurate at distance. Some seal clubbers have 19pt captains, which helps accuracy.

3: Don't sail in a straight line for more than 20 seconds. Don't sail towards ominous clouds of smoke. Don't ignore the "detected" warnings.

4: Play Umikaze and Isokaze DD's. Non premium but they are lots of fun and teach you loads.

5: Don't brawl in anything but BB's. And not until T5 or above.

6: There is no charge for ammo. "depot" is somewhere top left on screen in port.

7: AP works best on broadside but can do damage head on to cruisers and DD's.

8: Citadel is where you want to hit the enemy and you don't want the enemy to hit you. Basically a large room in the ship wich houses lots of important stuff. You can highlight citadel areas in port screen.

9: Yup.

10: Haven't played Charleston, but she'll be slow to maneovre and a slow reload. Will hit like a [edited] if she hits at all

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2) There is the completely ridiculous "x marks the spot" function on the minimap. Note the little circle in the direction you are looking / aiming. It used to be a mod (which was even better because it actually used an x, not a circle) - then it got incorporated into the game.

However, that mainly helps with blind shots and a bit with smoke shooting, not so much with long distance accuracy.

For that, you need to develop good aim, which is a difficult process that requires lots of time and practice. There are some YT videos about it like Notser's "Improve your aim". Also you need a ship with accurate guns, which would usually be a cruiser, preferably with high shell speed => heavy cruisers, especially Russian ones, but also all the other nations that have them. Or a higher tier Japanese BB.

3) It's called "WASD hack", aka varying course and speed, aka not sailing in straight lines. The first step is just making this a habit. Especially whenever there is a chance being in range of ships equipped with torpedoes. For example - and especially - ALWAYS in front of an enemy smoke screen. To my knowledge, there is only one single ship in the game that has smoke but no torpedoes (HMS Belfast). Zigzagging is usually beneficial even when there is no chance of torps, or at least it does not hurt. It only hurts if you need to get somewhere fast, because it obviously costs time. That's one of the reasons why you have to think ahead a few moves in this game - to avoid finding out too late that you should have been somewhere sooner.

Try playing DDs and other torpedo-equipped ships yourself for a while. It gives you a better feel for what they might be trying to do. And it will help you memorize their torp ranges. At any rate, find out which DDs can torp from beyond their concealment range and which ones can't. The latter need to find other ways to hit you, like using land cover or smoke cover, and/or do YOLO runs from ambushes.

Also, as a general rule, turn into torpedoes, not away from them. Counter-intuitively, it usually makes evasion easier and increases the chances of success. Search YT for "torpedobeats". Watch Yuro videos. Die of envy for those skills.

There is more you can do though, like saving your damage control party for when you do get hit and the ship starts flooding. As a general rule, in any ship with a repair party, do not use the damage control to put out a single fire. The repair party can repair all of the fire damage. You can even start it while the fire is still burning. When you get three fires, or your health gets really low while on fire, then you can consider using damage con, but not before.

You might want to use damage con on a disabled gun turret, because you risk the turret being completely taken out of action, should it get hit a second time before it is repaired. In situations like that, you just need to make a risk assessment, and then you have to accept the trade-off. Whenever your repair is on cooldown, you risk a fatal flooding on a torpedo hit.

4) Edit: You can see for yourself which ships are on sale by checking the respective page in the premium shop (https://eu.wargaming.net/shop/wows/vehicles) and the tech tree of the game, where other ships may be on offer for gold doubloons or Free XP. Edit 2: And of course the Arsenal, though I'd rather spent the small amount of real money instead of losing coal over a low tier ship. Check the Wiki for ships that may have been available earlier. If you want to torture yourself.

Do not buy a Mikasa unless you are prepared for a cute but largely useless, silly and frustrating little ship. Also don't buy a Katori unless you are a really patient type. It is a cruiser with the speed and agility of a slow battleship, even though its few guns are very accurate and also have the range of a battleship. I do play it sometimes when the mood strikes me but then I got it for free through some promo. Do buy an Ishizuchi, although it is neither the one nor the other but a battlecruiser, and do buy a Yubari if you must. It has the same guns as Katori and they are really good. But do watch some YT videos of these ships and read up on them on this forum before you shell out money. You can find out what ships are in the game, besides much more stuff, from the Wiki. http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/World_of_Warships

Edit: Tachibana (with or without Lima) is also not very good and makes you work very hard for your wins. But at least it is super cheap. The Lima version has been on sale for 89 Euro cents for a while now in the premium shop, which means you can always sell it to use the port slot for something else with zero regrets.

5) Full manual AA is a four-point commander skill, as is manual secondaries fire control. You can focus these auxuliary armaments even without the skill though. Read up on the wiki on what all of that does.

6) The depot is called "inventory" and it only becomes available at account level 13 => read Wiki. To see what you get charged for after the battle, read the respective bill on the fourth post-battle screen, "Credits & XP".

7) AP pen is super complicated since the algorithm takes into account the angle of incidence and the shell speed. You can get lots of overpens even "in the middle". The Wiki was no great help, last I looked. Watch Wargaming's "How it Works" series on Youtube, watch lots of Flamu tutorials. Search this forum, there once were specialised posts with lots of math, graphs and tables.

8) The citadel is the only area, deep inside a target ship, where your shells even have a theoretical chance of actually doing the maximum amount of damage as specified in the Wiki. Those yuge numbers they talk about in all those YT video reviews. If they penetrate the citadel. Should they only penetrate the outer hull but don't get through to the citadel, it's at most a third of that value. Overpens - at most ten per cent.

This is what makes DDs so resilient: They do not have a citadel. Hence, any shells aimed at a DD are robbed of 60% to 90% of their theoretical effectiveness before they even leave the muzzle.

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Do buy an Ishizuchi, although it is neither the one nor the other but a battlecruiser,

It's a battleship. You might look at it and say IRL it was planned as a battlecruiser and all, but it fills a battleship spot and for T4 it is undoubtedly a battleship and definitely not a cruiser. It looks like a battleship, it plays like a battleship, not like a cruiser. It is tankier than Wyoming and craps on cruisers harder than Wyoming.

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Sure, sure. "Load up the HE and screw people over" was your advice on how to play it if I remember correctly.

I guess Orion is a cruiser too, right? And Iron Duke.

It's not like the AP doesn't work...

Spoiler

13 minutes ago, Nautical_Metaphor said:

Wyoming has less hp, it has 26 mm more belt armour (203 vs 229 mm, which are both at the lower ends of T4 BB belt, but miles above low tier cruisers), which in practice means if a BB gets its broadside it can delete it just as easily. What Wyoming does not have is this...

Spoiler

Only BB HE will pen this deck, making Ishizuchi far more resistant than Wyoming to HE spam, which is fairly common at low tiers (a general trend among low and mid tier IJN vs USN BB). Ishizuchi also has a reinforced lower bow, which is not terribly useful, but at least offers slightly more protection than the complete 19 mm bow Wyoming has. So, might be my opinion, but it is founded on actual stats.

21 minutes ago, Nautical_Metaphor said:

Because it's a lot faster than Wyoming, has a faster reload than Wyoming, the guns turn quicker than Wyoming and even the smaller number of guns is still ample against cruisers.

IOW because it's a battlecruiser.

Because it has 305 mm guns just like Wyoming, 10 guns vs 12, but 25 second reload and 2.0 sigma. In a BB vs BB fight, Ishizuchi also has no issue taking a Wyoming apart with AP.

If you haven't found it already, the wiki that people are referring to is here: http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/World_of_Warships As well as lots of good (and reasonably accurate) ship information, it has good sections explaining the various in-game mechanics; understanding those will make your life a lot easier.

Regarding aiming - watch this:

(it's not hugely recent, but still relevant).

Apropos citadels: others have covered what they are off well, but one thing (I think) that wasn't mentioned: besides doing maximum damage if you penetrate one, it is also worth shooting people's citadels because the damage is mostly not repairable - some ships have a repair party consumable, that allows them to recover lost hp, and whilst things like fire damage are 100% repairable, citadel damage is not. The 'consumables' section of the wiki has more: http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Consumables

Related to the pretty coloured tracers thing: if you ever get one of these captains yourself, you have to activate the special skills before they'll show in game - there are a bunch of icons to click on the left-hand side of the captain's skills page that you access from the port.

Have fun, and keep asking questions - people that want to learn will nearly always get sensible/helpful answers on here...

Note: several of them are no longer available (the Kamikazes/Fujin notably).

As well as the information in the wiki itself, most of the premium ship entries include a link to Little White Mouse's review of said ship (LWM is a Canadian - I think - WOWS player of some note, who does rather good reviews; not everyone agrees with her conclusions 100% of the time, but they're a good starting point) - always read reviews before spending money on a premium!

Speaking of premium ships, it looks like you know already about the general inadvisability of buying high tier premiums too soon; if you happen to be buying Xmas boxes and win one though, you can always play it in Coop mode - an option lacking in WOT.

I believe Charleston is exclusive to new players at the moment - she's one of the newer premiums in the game.

There will probably be bonus seal-clubber points for whatever unscrupulous experienced player is first to bag the hide of one of these! I haven't seen one in game yet - I suspect most are still safe behind protected MM...!

The US cruisers are worth a look, but aren't 'easy' mode by any means; there are two branches, as you'll have seen - CAs (heavy cruisers), and CLs (light cruisers); both are very fragile in the teeth of BB fire, and you lack torps after T5. They're worth playing (magnificent AA later on), but I might suggest picking the IJN cruisers to start with - they have good torps, so you aren't as reliant on being able to shoot straight.

Doesn't mean you shouldn't have fun with Charleston though - the volume of fire she can put out (assuming she's vaguely like the silver version) is glorious - I'll buy her as soon as grumpy old players have access to her, just for the giggles.